Tag Archives: parent company

If you were an audio geek in the last 15 years, Winamp was on your system. I remember when I put together my first Shoutcast server using Winamp. I put all my music on it so I could listen while I was at work. I also put my podcasts on Shoutcast in the early days to try and get more listeners.

AOL announced that on December 20th, they will be closing the service. If you head to their webpage, you will see the following:

Winamp.com and associated web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013. Additionally, Winamp Media players will no longer be available for download. Please download the latest version before that date. See release notes for latest improvements to this last release.
Thanks for supporting the Winamp community for over 15 years.

This marks the end of an era for those audio geeks that sent their podcasts out via the Lama. Services like Pandora and Spotify – along with updated media players on the computer have replaced this once valid media player.

I remember when you couldn’t really play certain MP3s or other audio files on Windows media player. Yet, Winamp would always play those files.

The service started on April 21, 1997 by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev. The service also featured custom skins to the player – which I recall using the Star Trek skin for many years. In 1999, AOL purchased the parent company, Nullsoft.

Nullsoft has added no additional comments. No word of support for anybody who purchased Winamp Pro.